The Irresistible Henry House (4 page)

Sometimes—in the rare moments when she had Henry all to her-self—she would let him put his arms around her neck, and she would whisper to him, “Hold tight.” Now, sensing change like a scent in the air, she heard the words in her own mind, just as clearly and firmly as if she were talking to him.
Hold tight.

CHRISTMAS FELL ON a Wednesday. All the girls would be going home for the holiday. So on the Saturday before they took off, they gathered at the practice house for their own practice Christmas.

Martha gave Henry a red fire truck, her standard gift for practice house boys. Beatrice had knitted him a stocking with an
H
that sagged dramatically across the top. Ruby had crocheted him a bright red sweater using yarn that had been sheared and dyed on her parents’ farm. The rest of the girls gave presents that suggested their own expectations of Henry, or perhaps their own views of themselves. Betty gave him a set of finger paints and a box of crayons. Connie gave him books. Ethel gave him a silly pull-toy dog on a little string leash. And Grace, who had the most money, gave him a miniature white piano that even Mozart would have been years away from being able to play.

When they had all opened their gifts for him, Henry sat on the rug next to the Christmas tree and, ignoring each of the actual presents, chewed merrily on the plastic lid of a box that had held Christmas cookie sprinkles. After a while, Grace sat beside him on the rug and plinked out “White Christmas” on the little piano, and Henry grinned, allowing a mouthful of saliva to drop onto the rug.

Surrounded by his seven mothers, only one of whom had tried to conceal the wish that her gift—and her arms—would be chosen above all others, Henry sat in his red sweater, plump and passionate, like a tiny Santa Claus himself, and looked from one to another of them, as if trying to figure out what he should give to whom.

  4  
Give Me the Baby, Dear

Two weeks later, Martha heard the news from Ruby—that Betty had finally received a letter. From the somber tone in Ruby’s voice, Martha could only assume that this would have to be
the
letter.

“When did it come?” Martha asked Ruby.

Henry was in the nursery, taking his nap, and Ruby was helping Martha take down the Christmas tree ornaments.

“I think it was just this morning,” Ruby said.

“Did you see Betty yourself?”

“No. I saw Beatrice in town on our walk,” Ruby said.

Martha knew it was unkind, but she couldn’t help feeling angry that her whole routine and the house’s routine—and the whole routine of the college, for that matter—would be thrown off by the inevitable bustle and sadness over Betty’s husband’s death. There would be a memorial service, of course. And compulsory condolence visits to Dr. Gardner’s house. Maybe even a plaque or portrait at some point. And there would be Betty herself, whose needs would now come before anyone else’s.

Martha had seen Betty’s husband only once—about two years before—the week he had come back on leave, when he and Betty had stopped to see her father briefly just before he shipped out again. To Martha, he had looked odd then, like an undernourished Popeye, with a goofy, slightly uneven face. He was still young enough to be wearing—like tiny badges—bits of tissue on the places where he’d cut himself shaving.

Martha sighed as she took a wrapped ornament from Ruby and tucked it into a corner of the hatbox in which she kept the most delicate of the Christmas decorations. She wondered why it was that her own husband couldn’t have died valiantly, guaranteeing not only his martyrdom but hers as well. “Poor Martha,” people would have said, the way they had already spent the year saying “Poor Betty.” And everything she did, or tried, would have been construed as courageous. Yes, Betty had lost her young husband. But at least she would have good wishes, sad smiles, and all of her future before her. And she would have her father’s help and protection. That couldn’t hurt much, either.

The real courage, Martha was starting to believe, was going on when no one cared if you went on or not.

“Mrs. Gaines?” Ruby was asking from her perch at the top of the stepladder. She was trying to liberate a string of cranberries from the highest branches of the Christmas tree, and the challenge was clearly unnerving her. “Can you give me a hand, Mrs. Gaines?” Ruby asked.

“We throw the cranberries out with the tree,” Martha said abruptly, her anger surprising them both. “You’ve been studying home economics for more than three months now, Ruby. Surely you would have learned that if you keep berries in a hatbox for a year you can expect them to rot.”

Stung by Martha’s tone, Ruby let go of the strand and looked down from her tangled heights. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gaines. I was just trying to—”

“Yes,” Martha said, and, distracted, walked into the kitchen, still carrying a striped crystal bell.

In the kitchen, she stood by the stove, looked down at the green and white checked linoleum tiles, and tried to govern her feelings. Then, unexpectedly, Betty was at the back door, her face slick with tears and hurt, which made her look even younger than usual.

“Is he still asleep?” she asked as she barged into the kitchen and jostled Martha. The bell in Martha’s hand dropped and broke, melodically, on the pristine floor.

With barely a glance at the ground, Betty was already heading down the corridor to Henry’s room, the soles of her brown and white saddle shoes squeaking on the warped wooden floor.

“Betty!” Martha shouted after her.

“What was that?” Ruby called.

“Betty!” Martha repeated, stepping over the broken glass.

In the nursery, Betty had already picked Henry up and lifted him onto her shoulder, so that his face fit neatly against the pale curve of her neck. She was crying, but soundlessly, and her eyes were shut, as if she was praying.

“I’m sorry,” Betty said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry I made you drop that. What was it?”

“Only an ornament. Let me take the baby, dear,” Martha said.

Betty shook her head as fiercely as having a sleeping baby crooked into her neck would allow.

“I know you must be devastated,” Martha said. “Believe me. You have all my sympathy. But really, you know. The baby shouldn’t be held so much.”

Betty shook her head again and seemed to hold Henry even tighter.

“Would you like me to call your father?” Martha asked, as gently as possible.

“No.”

“I think you should give me the baby now,” Martha said. She had the illusion that she was talking to a jumper who had already decided that nothing made more sense than jumping. But it was not exactly worry for the baby that was making Martha nervous. It was not worry for Betty, either. It was actually the premonition that something was going to be physically ripped away from her.

“Come,” Martha said one last time, and then she took a step closer to Betty.

“Let us alone,” Betty said, her neck and head bent over Henry’s head, like a third, protective arm.

“Dear, I’m so sorry about your husband,” Martha said. “Here. Give me the baby, dear. Let me get you a tissue.”

Martha grabbed three tissues from the box she always kept on the dresser, beside Henry’s little blue plastic brush and comb. She fought the impulse to wipe Betty’s face the same way she cleaned Henry’s. Instead she thrust the tissues into Betty’s hands, essentially forcing a trade, and finally Betty handed the baby to Martha and started to wipe her eyes.

“Do you know how Fred died?” Martha asked gently.

Betty shook her head again, and then began to sob. Every gasp showed the girl’s tiny ribs and perfect waist. It was hard to believe that a vessel this small could hold such enormous pain.

Finally, with what seemed a mythic effort of will, Betty stopped crying and put her hands at right angles to her body, as if trying to push down her feelings, or at least the air around her.

“With any luck it was quick, and he didn’t have to suffer,” Martha said.

“No,” Betty said, gesturing again to hold down the air. “It’s not like that. Fred isn’t dead. He’s alive.” And she burst into tears again.

AFTER MARTHA HAD SENT RUBY OUT with Henry for his walk, Betty unfolded the letter for Martha to see. Though it had only come that morning, it already had the look of something nervously overhandled, as if with each opening there had been the hope of finding a different message. Stamps with oval faces bordered the top of the gray-blue envelope like guards, and the words BY AIR MAIL were printed across the cover in bold blue capital letters. The message inside was equally forceful, written in capitals too, as if intended as a telegram for which the characters had to be counted. Martha read:

NEVER WENT BACK. AWOL ITALY, THEN HID AUSTRALIA. THEN ASHAMED TO EXPLAIN. BUT REALIZE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU. COME MEET ME. MELBOURNE P.O. KNOWS ADDRESS. LAST NAME NOW WHAT YOU USED TO CALL ME FOR FUN. SOONEST. DEAREST. NEW LIFE AHEAD.

For several minutes, Martha read and reread the note, trying to figure out what to say. Gingerly, as if she were tucking Henry into bed, Martha put the letter sheet inside the envelope and handed it back to Betty. As she did so, she noticed the tiny, pale blood vessels fanned out across Betty’s exhausted eyelids. The teakettle whistled, another cry.

“I know this must be a shock to you,” Martha finally ventured, taking down a bag of Lipton to dunk in each of two china cups. “And that you must be a bit confused about the idea of your husband—”

Betty shook her head again.

“What did Dr. Gardner—What did your father say?” Martha asked.

“My father doesn’t know yet,” Betty said.

“Why not?” Martha asked, nonplussed. But it would be another week before Betty would tell that part of the story. For now, she merely stared at Martha, as if from a roiling ocean.

“But, dear, Fred
is
alive,” Martha finally said. “I would think that would be more important to you than anything else.”

Betty poured what must have been five seconds’ worth of sugar into her teacup, then stirred it with needless vigor. “Where’s Ruby?” she finally asked. “It looks like rain. She should bring him back,” she said.

“Betty. It’s Ruby’s week.”

“She doesn’t know how to handle him.”

“She’s learning all the time,” Martha said. “You all have your strengths and weaknesses.”

“He’s mine,” Betty said.

“We all feel that way sometimes,” Martha said.

“No,” Betty said, with surprising strength. “I mean he’s mine. I had him this summer. He isn’t Fred’s. Fred doesn’t know,” she said. “Henry’s my son.”

  5  
A Puppy in the Sun

The facts were fairly simple, though it took Betty time to admit them all, and she changed them several times before she stuck with one story. The most important fact was that the baby wasn’t her husband’s.

Henry, it turned out, was the child of a man whose first name was Jerry and whose last name Betty would never know. She had met him in a movie line in Pittsburgh three months after Fred shipped out. She had let Jerry bring her back to the apartment where she and Fred had been living. Unglued by fear, wine, and loneliness, she had let him spend the night. Not even the whole night, actually. Barely the length of the movie they’d seen. Then he had disappeared.

Betty had been eighteen. For nearly three months, telling no one, she’d simply hoped that the baby would go away. She was working at a hat shop, and on her break one afternoon she read an ad in the back of the
Pittsburgh Sun
about how to get the problem fixed. For two weeks, she drank a daily concoction of rosemary, bay leaves, pumice, pepper, vinegar, and Coke. When that didn’t work, she began to exercise constantly, exhaustingly. She did a hundred sit-ups each night and another hundred each morning. Finally, she summoned the courage to ask a pharmacist if there was someone she could see. The druggist gave her an address. She lost her nerve at the last moment, though, when she overheard some coffee-shop talk about a girl “botched” in a back-alley job.

When, in Betty’s sixth month, an old woman gave up a bus seat for her, Betty broke down, called her father from Pittsburgh, told him what had happened, and asked if she could come home.

“And what did he say?” Martha asked Betty over the cup of tea that had become, by the following week, their daily ritual.

“He cursed at me first,” Betty admitted, wrapping her hands around her teacup as if clasping them in prayer. “He actually used a swearword. Then he said thank God my mother was dead, or this would kill her. Then he asked me where the father was, and when I told him I didn’t know, he said thank God I didn’t know, or he would kill
him.”

“And then?” Martha asked.

“Then he asked if there was any chance Fred would believe the baby was his, and I said no. And then he sent me to the Home.”

Martha sighed. Of course. That was what girls did if they were pregnant and unmarried or in disgrace. They went to stay in maternity homes—in one door secretly, pregnantly; then out the other, welcomed back to resume their lives as if nothing but time had been lost. It was from exactly these homes that orphanages like Irena’s—and in turn programs like Martha’s—were able to get their babies, and to pass them on, if all went well, to real families who would want them.

ON THE FIRST MONDAY after Betty’s revelation, President Gardner made another unannounced visit to the practice house. This time, Martha felt quite sure that she knew why he had come.

“You’ve come to see your grandson again?” she asked him softly after Beatrice had taken Henry down the hall.

“We will never call him that,” Dr. Gardner snapped.

The president strode into the living room and took his seat by the fireplace.

“I apologize,” Martha said quickly. “I didn’t realize.”

“I obviously cannot change the fact that Bettina chose to tell you her entire wretched story,” he began without preface. “But I will say that if you repeat to a single soul even a word of this very personal business, you will be out of a job on the very same day that I hear about it. I will not have the name of this college being dragged through the mud,” he said. “Do you understand?”

“Of course,” Martha said. “I would never say anything.”

The president looked around, presumably for somewhere to put his frustration.

“Don’t you ever light a fire in here?” he finally asked.

“Well, we do worry a bit with the baby so close to walking,” Martha said, getting to her feet.

“When Bettina was a baby and we still lived in Vermont, we had a potbellied stove, and all our neighbors with children kept their stoves surrounded by wrought-iron gates. Every day, Bettina’s mother warned her not to go near ours, and one day she did, and she burned her hand, and she never went near it again.”

Martha paused for a moment, considering how to respond to this pearl of wisdom.

“I don’t think I’d get a lot of babies from the orphanage if I sent them back with burnt hands,” she finally said.

“You will go on getting babies from the orphanage as long as I tell the orphanage that we need babies,” Dr. Gardner said.

Martha, expertly wielding the fireplace tongs as if the logs were lumps of sugar, allowed this to sink in. “Irena Stahl knows about Henry, then?” she asked as she arranged pieces of kindling into a perfectly balanced tower.

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Gardner said.

“Then how did he come to be here?” Martha asked. It was Irena, after all, who had insisted that Martha take Henry, despite his having been only three months old. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

“It’s perfectly obvious,” the president said. “I told Irena I had heard about a baby who needed to be placed. Until we knew what had happened to Fred, Bettina simply refused to give the baby up. Do you see?”

“Yes,” Martha said.

“I know I should have insisted, right from the start, that he be sent far away. I’ve already regretted that. But Bettina seemed so fragile.”

“Yes,” Martha said again.

Then Dr. Gardner brushed a crumb from the lapel of his jacket, as if he were shaking off the moment. “Imagine,” he said. “Thousands upon thousands of girls give these babies up
all
the time, and get on with their lives. Not Bettina. She even wanted to keep him with us at my residence. Can you imagine?”

“No,” Martha said, but she could.

The president let out a kind of laugh. “I told her if we did that, it wouldn’t be my residence for long.”

That was true, of course. A college was a place where people expected—and, Martha felt, deserved—to find propriety. Martha took two logs and carefully laid them across the andirons.

“And now? Will Betty keep him?” Martha asked, as gently as possible.

“Keep him! A bastard?” Dr. Gardner intoned. “A
bastard?”
His eyes flashed at Martha. “Bettina’s place is with her husband. She
will
be going to Australia, and I can promise you she will not be showing up there with some other man’s child.” From the nursery, the sound of Henry’s laughter emerged, like an unexpected song. Somewhat more gently, the president added: “And in time, she and Fred can have children of their own.”

BUT BETTY DIDN’T LEAVE right away. Over the months that followed, she twirled the practice house into a constantly moving, ever-more-powerful, Betty-centered vortex. She was nearly always the subject of conversation, even though she had told no one but Martha that she was Henry’s mother. Instead, all the girls—and most of the campus—knew only that Fred had deserted the Army. They believed the reason Betty was always in tears had to do with the shame of being married to a deserter, and the sadness of having to leave her home and her family in order to be with him.

The girls—Connie and Grace particularly, who were closest in upbringing if not experience—complained about Betty’s frequent pop-in visits, which they attributed to her position not only as daughter of the president but also as resident diva.

“Why doesn’t she just go, already?” Connie asked.

“I suppose she’s not sure she wants to live in Australia as the wife of some guy who could be court-martialed any minute,” Grace answered.

“So she’d rather leave her husband when he needs her most,” Connie said.

“And stay with Daddy? Why not?”

And Martha, though tempted, offered no answer to that question.

OVER TIME, HOWEVER, it became abundantly clear to Martha that, despite the agonized (and frequently confided) vacillations of Betty’s heart, there was no way that she would or could stay at Wilton. Staying would mean ending her marriage, outraging her father, bringing scandal to the college, and, apparently, raising a child without any financial support. In 1947, what was unusual about Betty’s situation was not that she would give up the baby but that she had managed to stay in his proximity for so long.

By March, Betty began to make plans to join Fred in Australia, and by May, she had begun showing up less and less often at the practice house.

SHE LEFT FOR AUSTRALIA three days after Henry’s first birthday. She was thin and pale and sick and cried-out. Henry, too, seemed not himself that day—or perhaps that was simply Martha’s imagination, or a new phase of his development. It was typical, Martha felt, for one-year-olds to be withdrawn. At least that had been her experience. Certainly Henry could have no sense of what he was losing. No one around him did.

What Martha would remember most about the day was what Henry did when Betty walked out the door. Though he had just started standing up, he crawled onto the living room rug and into a trapezoid of sunlight, toppled over onto his side, and—despite the bandage that was supposed to deter him—put his thumb in his mouth. For a long while, Henry stayed there, like a puppy in the sun, the trapezoid perfectly framing him, as if he were trapped in a weird, warped viewfinder.

Then Ruby ran back inside and told Martha that Betty needed to tell her one more thing, and Martha walked out to the front yard. Amid the lushness of the new green summer, Betty looked down at the ground, where two bees chased each other past a fallen rose. She whispered, “Take care of him for me.”

Martha nodded firmly, deciding at that moment not to ask Betty
for how long.
If she didn’t ask, she could always believe that Betty had meant forever.